SMSL M500 MKII Review (DAC & HP Amp)

[Georgrig]

Perhaps it happens, because our alphabet is not native to them.
也许它会发生，因为我们的字母表不是他们所固有的。
The safest bet might be IMHO, to employ a designer from the "Latin alphabet zone".

Explain the UI of Japanese products, genius.

Nothing to do with ethnicity. Some companies don't put the attention

 

[respice finem]

Explain the UI of Japanese products, genius.

Nothing to do with ethnicity. Some companies don't put the attention

How long are the Japanese companies on the US/EU market? You can't buy decades of experience. Then again, the first 1-2 decades of Japanese audio equipment were in the age when making fonts and such was largely manual, which kind of enforced more diligence IMHO.
Certainly, some companies, regardless of the country, will be better, also design-wise, than others. BTW I'm no genius

 

[respice finem]

I think it measures great,
......... but also think IT IS expensive.

Not based on what I can afford or think is a lot of money, but simply on what you get for $440 .....

Of course I can't know the whole market, but, which device with at least the same measurements and (not or) functions is available cheaper?

 

[Nango]

Does "Chinese HiFi" include Matrix Audio?

Matrix Audio gear looks perfect. Edit: Not only looks perfect, it is perfect chinese hifi same like tons of other chinese mfr.

 

[Georgrig]

Matrix Audio gear looks perfect.

But it is a Chinese brand. So better be more careful with your statements.

 

[Negatywny]

another great cheap DAC/HPamp - at this stage it can probably be said that it would be more appropriate to throw the processing capacity to a different front...

 

[fastfreddy666]

It's so cute looking. I just want to hug it.

It uses a nextgen XMOS XU-216 USB chip (1) which is capable of receiving 32 bit / 768khz PCM input. It also supports MQA and DS512 of course but those formats are already obsolete. The DAC is an ES9038Pro DAC chip with an ES9311 dedicated power chip that provides clean, low-noise power to the DAC. As icing on the cake it sports a brand new self-developed CK-02 clock processing circuit that reduces clock jitter.

So yeah. 32 bit / 768Khz uncompressed or GTFO. The dynamic range that can be represented by a 32-bit (floating point) file is 1528 dB. WOW. I'm speechless (one slight problem. The greatest difference in sound pressure on Earth can be about 210 dB. Not something you want to experience).

I hope you have enough space on your NAS or fileserver to store your entire collection. The bitrate is 368.64 Megabyte per minute. So for a CD of 74 minutes you need 27.28 GB of HDD space. It's not a big deal. According to Seagate's roadmap (a US HDD manufacturer)
50+ TB HDDs will be available sometimes in 2026. You don't need to worry about running out of space.

I'm waiting for the day we start doing some ABX testing with those files like MasterApex is doing on a thread on this wonderful forum. (2)

I'm joking of course. Can you hear the difference between a 24/96khz and 32/768khz PCM file? Don't be silly. Of course you can't.

I already have difficulties hearing the difference between a FLAC file and the very crude Low-complexity sub-band codec (SBC) bluetooth is using. I only use it in my car. But still I ripped my entire CD collection and captured some of my more obscure vinyl stuff to FLAC just because I can and I have plenty of HDD space on my NAS. I can access the thing from the internet (IT nerd) of course. But in case my apartment complex burns down (it happens you know) I also have a backup in the cloud. The problem is that I only have 2 TB of cloud space at the moment. So I also converted my collection of 100.000+ files with a program called dBPowerAmp to AAC (Apple encoder) at maximum quality (true variable bit rate quality 127 ~335kb) which is already overkill because it's already supposed to be transparent at 128kb.

There are several reasons for this. I'm not trained. I live in a city with a train station at walking distance and parallel to that is a highway. On the other side of my apartment there's a main road which leads to that highway. As you can imagine this generates a lot of noise. Normal SPL levels here in my living room are about 38dB and add a few db more at rush hour. I have a few closed headphones for monitoring purposes and they do isolate somewhat of the background noise. But unfortunately not enough. For this kind of work you need an environment with < = 25 dB of noise (this also depends on the frequency of the noise. Car noises are predominately low frequency). This is about the same as a typical recording studio.

To spot tiny artifacts in music is hard work which will require a lot of training and requires your complete attention. I don't envy expert listeners. It's kind of a tedious and time consuming job. You also have to do blind tests over and over again. (statistics is a bitch. You want a 95% confidence interval or not? Let's do some more) Some people have a knack for it (like Amirm). I'm also getting older and that doesn't help (vintage 1969). There's also the fact that different expert listeners are sensitive to different artifact types. I name a few: Pre-echo, unmasked granular (quantization) noise (Amirm is good at that) and high frequency cut or boost.

In the early days of MP3 (the format was released on 6 December 1991 by Fraunhofer institute. So the format is more than 30 years old). I was fascinated with how this was even possible and experimented with encoding myself. I thought it was a kind of magic. (see my signature) It wasn't. It's psychoacoustics. In the year 1999 a new phenomenon emerged on the internet It was a software program called Napster. You could share music files for free. That was totally illegal of course. And I apologize (Admission of guilt. please don't sue me) to the copyright holders.
Most stuff was encoded at a constant 128kb bitrate. A popular encoder at the time was the Xing Encoder because it was fast. What it did was cutting off high frequencies > 16 Khz. I could immediately spot the difference between the Xing encoder and the Fraunhofer encoder files even with my crappy computer speakers. At about the same time there was an open source project named L.A.M.E (LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder) It wasn't very good at first but they kept on tinkering with the psychoacoustic model until they got it right. The MP3 spec only specifies the decoder and the format of the file so it can be played with your Ipod or whatever. The encoder isn't specified. It's the encoder where "the magic" happens. I can go on and on about Fletcher–Munson curves, critical bands, BARK scales, ERB (equivalent rectangular bandwidth) and stuff like that but this can get overly technical for the uninitiated. It's magic..

I listen to music to relax and unwind after a stressful day at work and for that my AAC files are good enough. But I have FLACs on my NAS so why not listen to them instead? I know my limitations and I'm good with that. I have no pretentions at all of hearing differences between this amplifier or that amplifier. But I strongly believe in the science because it's the only thing that's verifiable. Opinions can't be verified or tested so not valid in science. I'm also interested in psychology and love reading the comments here on the this forum. Happy new year everybody.

Opinions are like buttholes. Everybody has one.

(1) Datasheet-porn: https://www.xmos.ai/download/XU216-512-TQ128-Datasheet(1.16).pdf
(2) highly recommended: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ic-amazon-hd-sound-quality-differences.29450/ I'm afraid i won't make the cut so I won't be able to participate unfortunately.

If you want to know more about this Amirm made some excellent video's about the subject. I Highly recommend them

Audio Blind Tests and Listener Training:

Audio Blind Testing - You Are Doing It Wrong!

 

[Tks]

The performance is quite high. The only literal "flaw" from metrics present, is the 50mV (doesn't cross into the mid to low 90dB's). But they did justice with the ESS chip that usually gives many folks troubles.

Though I hope we had output impedance measured, as that's the only thing missing (along with unbalanced performance not actually shown due to XLR performance graph being used).

Though there is still those weird usability issues like the remote not working it seems? And just the perplexing menu structure (why would anyone care to have PCM or DSD in large letters instead of the volume?).

Matter of fact, this whole UI ordeal is a disaster in the entire industry (and not just audio tbh, but audio is pretty bad). They really need to get some designers on board and solve the issue once and for all, and simply make small iterations after that.

It seems companies in audio work in a blackbox situation. Where they've never seen any other product's UI, and are literally doing this as if they found someone that could possibly never make it seem as if a design was being copied in any remote sense.

 

[xaviescacs]

I agree with the design issues, but good design is expensive. It's very easy yo come up with a couple of ideas here and there, but good and consistent design is expensive. Do you prefer this product or a better designed one for 200 extra? These Chinese DACs have better performance than the majority of equivalent western products for half the price. KUDOS to them.

 

[Pulkass]

Serious question : do "general public" or "vast majority of people" buy a 440$ DAC? I don't think so.

... And are precisely the target audience.

Alright.

Some people do. I m 70 y o, been hooked to hi fi since 1969. I just bought my 8th DAC . Yes 450 bucks. No. I listen to hi Res music files.

 

[respice finem]

I agree with the design issues, but good design is expensive. It's very easy yo come up with a couple of ideas here and there, but good and consistent design is expensive. Do you prefer this product or a better designed one for 200 extra? These Chinese DACs have better performance than the majority of equivalent western products for half the price. KUDOS to them.

I wonder if it would make sense for a modern manufacturer to "crowd design" such an item. Because, why not?
Giving successful "crowd designers" free gear would probably be cheaper than hiring a design firm.

 

[xaviescacs]

I wonder if it would make sense for a modern manufacturer to "crowd design" such an item. Because, why not?

I don't think Chord is going to buy this.... xD

 

[respice finem]

Could be limited to one line, to see how it does.

 

[xaviescacs]

In this thread there are some ideas, because users know what they want, but from the idea to something that enginyeers can transform into a product there is a mile or two, and some professionals in the way. Sit down and "draw" something requires a good deal of knowledge and a lot of hours. Perhaps some designer could recollect the ideas presented here and propose something consistent and expect the company to buy it. Ideas can be brainstormed, discussed, refined and voted, but design is usually a job for some professional(s).

 

[respice finem]

In theory, yes, in practice sometimes the "professional" outcome is three fonts on one device, and such.
In Germany they call it "company blindness" (Betriebsblindheit).
That's why I think it's a good idea to at least hear what the potential buyers have to say, before the release of a "version 2" (for v1 probably not possible due to copycats). BTW one German company (RME) is partly doing this, at least in the firmware area, their forum is interesting to read.

 

[TunaBug]

I was reading through the product page at https://www.smsl-audio.com/portal/product/detail/id/546.html, saw mention of XU-216, and immediately wondered "MQA?". Sure enough, a couple of lines down, and they say it has MQA-CD. I'm not sure how that differs from just "MQA", but I would prefer it not be there, regardless. I find it interesting, though, that the device does not have any logos on it.

While I disagree with the attitude of some of the posts about the UI, I also ultimately agree with the conclusion that it's bad. @amirm I prefer your comments about the UI: they draw attention to it, while not dripping with attitude. You're just letter the reader produce their own judgement.

I'm also unimpressed that their web site's support section shows no firmware updates for any DAC products.

As a DAC this thing may have good numbers, but as a product I'm thinking "Poor".

 

[VintageFlanker]

Some people do. I m 70 y o, been hooked to hi fi since 1969. I just bought my 8th DAC . Yes 450 bucks.

I assume you didn't get my point...at all.

 

[JW001]

I think it measures great,
......... but also think IT IS expensive.

Not based on what I can afford or think is a lot of money, but simply on what you get for $440 .....

Yeah, but the ES9038PRO chip alone costs $91 (https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/ESS-Technology/ES9038PRO?qs=yqaQSyyJnNjMnVEi0U2uwA==). I know that in large quantities it can drop perhaps to $40 per unit, but still...

 

[sam_adams]

I am surprised though that they still show the input data type in large letters (PCM) rather than volume level which is far more important. Most people play nothing but PCM anyway. Would be nice to also see the selected DAC filter on the home screen.

Not enhanced or optimized . . .

Black on white:

White on black:

 

[respice finem]

Very nice, esp. the white on black version.